The Crescent Moon

by Francis Brett Young

I

Through the garden of the moon-flowers down those oblique paths which climbed the Sabæan terraces into the blackness of deep kloofs in which the track could only be felt. She was too overwhelmed by one fear to take count of any others. In her return she quite forgot the anxiety and fatigue which had marked her coming . . . she had almost forgotten James and the reason of her adventure. At length, not knowing why she did so, she stopped. Careless of what might be beneath her, she sat down, pressing her hands to her beating temples, alone in the middle of Africa. The sense of her solitariness came over her suddenly. She felt like a child who wakes from a strange dream in the middle of the night. She had to convince herself that it was silly to have been frightened. “I lost my head,” she said to herself. “It was ridiculous of me. It doesn’t do to lose one’s head out here. It’s a wonder I kept to the road.” She wished there had been a stream of water near: one of those little brooks which made her own land musical: for then she would have bathed her face and pulled herself together. She felt that if there were any more terrors to be faced she couldn’t cope with them in her present dishevelled condition. But in all that forest there was no murmur of water short of the M’ssente River, that tawny, sinister flood which was many miles away, and which in any case she dared not have approached for fear of crocodiles; so she contented herself with putting up her fallen hair and wiping her face with her handkerchief. She only hoped that while she had been sitting down the siaphu ants had not got into her petticoats. She rose to her feet, a little unsteady but now immensely fortified. “I think I can manage anything now,” she thought.

So she went on her way. The forest was very still, for whatever winds may have been wandering under the stars were screened from her by the interwoven tops of the trees. That there were winds abroad she guessed, for sometimes, in the air above her, she would hear the sound of a great sighing as the forest stirred in its sleep. There was one other sound which troubled her. At first she couldn’t be certain about it; she thought that her disturbed fancy was playing her tricks; but at length she became convinced that some animal was moving through the undergrowth parallel with her path. She stopped to listen, and all was still. She moved on again and the faint rustling in the leaves returned. She did this several times. Without doubt she was being followed. A new pang of terror assailed her. Godovius . . . supposing that he had actually followed her. Even though his presence might be in some sense a protection, she would rather have had anything than that. She argued swiftly with herself. If it were Godovius, she thought, he would not need to slink through the forest beside the track; he wouldn’t be afraid of coming into the open. Obviously it couldn’t be Godovius. Nor, for that matter, could it be an African, for, as he had told her, the Waluguru are frightened of the dark. She decided that it must be an animal. She thought of the leopard which Godovius had shot; she remembered hunters’ tales of the wounded buffalo which will follow a man for fifty miles, brooding upon a feud which must end with the death of one of the two. If it were something of that kind she hoped that the end would come soon. “I can’t do anything!” she thought. “I must just go on as if nothing were going to happen. But it will happen . . .”

It happened suddenly. A greater rustling disturbed a patch of tall grasses in a patch of swampy ground a little ahead of her, and in the path the figure of a man appeared.

One cannot tamper with the portrait. Although it was never my luck to meet Hare, there must be very few among the older settlers and hunters and adventurers of equatorial Africa who have not known him: a sinewy, grave and eminently characteristic figure that was always to be found stalking through the gloom of the unknown countries that have opened before the successive waves of occupation from the south. The men who went to Rhodesia in 1890 trod in his footsteps. With the Jameson raiders he lay in Pretoria jail. When the Uganda Railway was struggling upwards through the thorn-bush about Tsavo he was shooting lions in the rolling country above the Athi Plains which is now Nairobi hill. Everybody in central Africa knew him, not merely the English, but the Belgians, the Germans, the Portuguese, all of them, from the Zambesi to the Lorian Swamp. Everybody knew the face of Hare, everybody knew his fame as a shikari. And that was all; for his soul was as lonely as the solitudes into which he had so often been the first to penetrate. You may carry the simile a little further: it was of the same simplicity and patience and courage, if a country may be said to possess these attributes of a soul, and there are some people who think it can. In this solitude I have known of only one adventurer: and that was Eva Burwarton. Perhaps there had been one other many years before. I don’t know. At least Hare, that figure of tragedy, was fortunate in this. And it was thus they met. You are not to imagine the figure of which the East African settler will tell you over his sundowner in the New Stanley. What Eva Burwarton saw upon this strange occasion was a thin brown man, a scarecrow in the dark wood path, and liker to a scarecrow because of his arms. The sleeve of one was empty: the other swung helplessly at his side in spite of the strips of drab cotton which he had torn from his shirt to keep it steady. All his clothes were torn: his beard red with the dust of Africa: his lips and eyelids black with the same dust caked and encrusted: the skin of face and brow of the colour of red ochre. The blackened dust on lips and eyelids relieved the brightness of his teeth and eyes. He was a figure at the same time savage and bizarre, and as he staggered into the path he addressed her, as well as his parched tongue would let him, in a ridiculous attempt at German. He spoke as though he were drunk or raving. No wonder that she shuddered.

“Ich. . . . Ich. . .” he said. “O . . . nicht . . . frightened sei. Wasser. Will nicht leiden. Helf mir. Verstehn?”

She hadn’t tumbled to it that he was English, as anyone might have done who knew German. Brilliantly she stumbled into Swahili.

“Wataka maji. . . . Water. Oh, his arm’s broken. . . . Do lie down . . . you’ll fall.”

And he fell in the path at her feet. A minute later he smiled up at her. “You’re English?” he said. “My apologies. I’m sorry to have frightened you.” He still spoke thickly.

“You were speaking German to me? But you are English yourself . . .”

He said: “A Scotsman.” For a moment he could say no more, and all the time Eva was realising what a pitiable creature he was, with his torn, dusty face, his empty left sleeve and the other dangling arm. As a matter of fact, this alarming introduction had come as a reassurance to both of them.

At last he spoke: “First of all, if you don’t mind, water. I’ve had none for . . . it’s difficult to remember. The arm was ten days ago. If you can get a little . . . water” (it came out like that) “I can manage. You can put it in my hat.”

Now all her nervousness had gone. The forest, which had been a horror, became suddenly quite friendly. She took his greasy hat and walked away into the darkness; and in one of those poisonous creeks of the swamp she filled it with water that was as thick as coffee. On her return the black mouth greeted her with a smile that was altogether charming.

But it was a terrible thing to see him drink the filthy stuff. “You could feel,” she said, “the dryness of his throat.” He must have seen, for all the darkness, the pity in her eyes, for he hastened to explain that matters weren’t nearly as bad as they might have been. “The arm,” he said, “is nothing, a piece of bad luck. Time will mend it. But unless you are in some way a prodigy it is something of a handicap to have to do without hands.” Although the position had been desperately serious, and he wasn’t much of a hand at joking, he wanted to make a joke of it. He didn’t know much about women . . . that sort of woman at any rate; and this made him unusually anxious to be gentle with her. Besides, a man who is on the point of dying with thirst in the middle of Africa at night does not expect to fall in with a woman walking hatless and unarmed. He knew that something unusual was doing; he knew that she too was in trouble. And obviously he was going to help her. In the middle of Africa people help one another without asking questions: in their relations there appears a certain delicacy which sits particularly well on such a villainous-looking person as Hare was then. So he asked her nothing of herself. In a moment or two, his strength reviving, according to its obstinate wont, like that of a cut flower that had been given water, he sat up in the path. She glowed to see him better; two sick men would have been rather a large order.

“This is the M’ssente Swamp?” he asked at length. She answered: “Yes.”

“And the M’ssente runs into the Ruwu. Yes. . . . We’re about a hundred miles from the railway. Up above there are rubber plantations. Yours, I suppose?”

She told him that they belonged to a German, Godovius.

“Godovius?”

She tried “Sakharani.”

“Now I have it,” he said slowly. “Of course. A Jew. I know all about Mr. Godovius. . . . I’ve heard from the Masai. Sakharani. . . . Yes. And you are living on his estate?”

She denied it hastily. There was a hint of pity in his question. All the time she was conscious of the scrutiny of his eyes from within their dark circles. She told him that she came from the Luguru mission, a mile or two away, and that her brother was there. She told him their name.

He said: “A minister?” as though he were uncertain whether the information suited his plans. It was ludicrous that a man in this extremity should pick and choose his host.

There followed a long silence. At last he spoke:

“Now I think I can manage. I mean I think I can walk as far as the mission. But I want to put the case to you, Miss Burwarton, for it’s possible under the circumstances that you won’t like me to come.”

“Whatever the circumstances were,” she said, “I couldn’t let you go.” She meant that ordinary humanity wouldn’t let her turn him away; but I suspect that she was clutching also at the shadow of a strong man in him, because his gentleness had shown her already that he could help her. She could not have abandoned him if only for that reason.

“Well, don’t be hasty . . . you shall judge,” he said. “I’ll be perfectly frank with you and I shall expect you to be the same with me. My name is Hare. If you had been longer in this country you’d have heard of me; and you wouldn’t have heard much good. A fellow who makes his living as I do is not usually an exemplary person. No doubt a lady would be shocked by my way of living. I don’t know any, so that is no odds to me. When your neighbour Godovius hears that I was here, and probably he will hear sooner or later, I shall find myself clapped into jail at Dar-es-Salaam. If only I had the use of my hands I could get out of this country. In B. E. A. they know me well enough. And I’m not “wanted” for anything I’m more than usually ashamed of. It’s ivory poaching. I’ve never been a great believer in any game laws: and particularly German ones. But I realise that I’m done . . . more or less. There are only two alternatives: to shelter with you at Luguru and fight it out, or to throw in my hand on Godovius’s doorstep. In either case I sha’n’t starve: but the Germans have a long score to settle with me, and I doubt if they’ll kill any fatted calves when they get me. The other is a fair sporting chance. If your brother can find it in accordance with his conscience to aid and abet a felon. . . . Well . . . that’s all.”

But already she was convinced that the felon was a man that she could trust. I think she would have trusted him if the crimes to which he had confessed had included a murder. “Whatever it had been,” she said, “I couldn’t have thrown him over. It was so pathetic to see such a strong, hard man as that absolutely beaten. It wouldn’t have been fair. And I felt . . . I knew . . . that he had been somehow sent to help me.” (She wasn’t ashamed of the words.) “Even then I knew it.”

Perhaps she did. I think most of the things which Eva Burwarton did were dictated to her by instinct rather than reason: but there was another factor which she possibly discounted, or did not realise, and this was the knowledge that this man too was an enemy of Godovius. It struck her that they were both in the same boat.

As for James . . . whatever James might think—and it was quite possible that he wouldn’t countenance the protection of a man who was “wanted” by the German authorities as a matter of principle, if not for the protection of the mission’s name—whatever James might think, she had determined to take this man and to hide him. After what had happened that night she felt that she couldn’t take any risks of being left alone to deal with Godovius. For all she knew, James might be dead by the time she returned; and the mere presence of another man of kindred race had made her a little easier. It is in the way of a compliment to our race that she had so quickly decided that she could trust a gaunt and battered wreck of an adventurer—for that is what it came to—just because he was British. She clung to the happy chance of their meeting as if it were indeed her salvation. And she wanted from the first to tell him all her story, as a child might do to any stranger who sympathised with its loneliness. That was why she couldn’t answer him at first. She didn’t know where to begin.

He mistook the causes of her hesitation. “Very well then,” he said. “I quite understand. I can shift for myself. And I am grateful for your kindness. I had no right to ask for more.”

For answer she burst into tears. That was what she had been waiting for all the time since she had run out of Godovius’s room, and the sudden sense of relief which his presence implied quite overwhelmed her. She was ashamed of her crying; but she couldn’t help it. Through her tears she saw the ragged figure of Hare, squatting in the dark path and infinitely more embarrassed by this storm of feeling than herself. Indeed it was a strange setting for their first meeting. Under the same atmosphere of stress, within the same utter solitudes these two met and parted. In after time Eva always remembered this moment with a peculiar tenderness. Perhaps Hare remembers too.

At last she dried her tears.

“I’m all right now,” she said. “Are you sure you can manage two miles? . . . I don’t think it can be more. We will go slowly. And I will take your rifle.”

And though he protested, partly because he would not have her burdened, and partly because it offended his instinct to be for a moment unarmed, she slipped the strap of the Mannlicher from his shoulders, guiding it gently over his helpless right arm. Her tears had so steadied her that she acted without any hesitation. It is not strange that Hare wondered at her.